Sony has announced it is dumping its entire 8.2% stake in Square Enix, although Sony maintains it is merely because it is strapped for cash and has nothing to do with Square Enix’s outstanding performance in recent years.

Sony’s holdings originate from 2001 when difficulties experienced by the original Square led to it obtaining a substantial stake, which it maintained in the years to follow for “investment” and “management support” purposes.

Sony says the sale will not have any bearing on Square Enix software appearing on its platforms, not that non-social platforms seem to be of much interest to Square Enix of late.

It also maintains the sale is due to its own ongoing restructuring and not the performance of Square Enix – which has barely escaped rock bottom after the promising its own massive restructuring effort of continuing its reinvention as a mobile phone developer.

Square Enix's problems seem to come from the fact they tend to over develop some of their final fantasy titles which lead to long and costly development times. Look at how much material they admitted they had cut from FF13, some of which was used for further games in the series. They seem unable to have a smooth development planned out for recently FF titles, they always seem to hit a wall. Look at how long FF15 has been in development for lol.

I love Final Fantasy games as much as the next person but jesus Christ they need some planning in place during the development process, to keep costs down.

Right, because JPRGs are created and sold with westerners in mind. Listen kid, just because you discovered the JRPG genre on PS1 and have fond memories on it does not mean everyone else has. Especially when JRPG titles are created for JAPANESE. And accepted by the JAPANESE people long before you plebeians knew of their existence.

You overestimate the market for this. Most of the oldfags/fans are perfectly fine with FFVII and don't want Squeenix as it is now to ruin it. Or their good memories of it. And the newfags/fans just don't care.

Wasn't this exactly what oldfags/fans of SquareSoft said back in the days about FFVII? But somehow a new generation of retards/fans loved the shit out of it and everything was fine. Even though they called a glorified version of a novel a game, which I still find very odd.

Turns out that the retards/fans from then are the oldfags/fans from now. History repeats itself.

A lot of the big companies are basically conglomerates. Meaning they have dozens of companies under 1 parent company and these companies are not related in terms of types of business they perform.

Example: mitsui - makes cars under Mitsubishi, does banking under sumotomo-mitsui, does shipping under Mitsu-Osaka lines (MOL). They also build ships and plastics and have all sorts of other companies doing unrelated business under the mitsui name.

Isnt this about 3-4 WEEKS old? Whats happening sankaku? and, just so you know, the whole sale made Sony about 150 million USD. the 4.8 billion yen was proffit alone....3 weeks old info and wrong info about...something is going crazy sankaku

I only know that square enix makes the whole FinalFantasies series, but isn't that also one of their biggest downfalls? I mean, to me it feels like they literally milked everything there was to milk (or they lacked the creativity to expand the world of FF) and they didn't have any decent backup projects.

tl;dr the management of Square Enix relied too much on the succes the FF series generated and failed to look for alternative series they could have developped.

Sony are doing alright, their loss's if we use the 2013 stats. Literally have been covered in their profits. (Profit before taxes covers it and profit after taxes cover the latest 200 million loss). So unless they had huge loss in the last fiscal year, they fine. They need 25 billion $ for operating expenses. So they need like a huge catastrophic size loss.

Funny thing is Char, Dragon Quest costs significantly less to make, and sells more than Final Fantasy in Japan, on average at least 3-5 million per game(Except the flop online game). They could in theory drop Final Fantasy and save a shit ton in dev costs but the overseas fans would rage.

not really, what's pathetic is how many people make comments like yours without any real knowledge of the market.

news flash = Square-Enix was NEVER as big as i suspect a lot of foreign fans think they were/are. i can pretty much guarantee they were never as big as i suspect you think they were.

S-E was NEVER the biggest dog in the yard in Japan, or even a serious rival for being one of the big dogs.

they are a large 3rd party developer that's done a little publishing and merchandising on the side. and that's all there have ever been.
they're Naughty Dog, or any big successful developer now.

but like Naughty DOg or any big developer, their success and size is nothing compared to the big publishers.

S-E was never one of the big publishers.
they published their own shit. they published a couple RPGs from smaller devs. but thats about it.

they were never anything close to the likes of Nintendo or Namco or (to answer your question) Capcom.
those guys do a lot more publishing, a lot more merchandising, and in general just a lot more business than Square-Enix ever did.

so its not that pathetic or surprising. its just a reality that a lot of people are seemingly completely ignorant about.

SE is juste a small part of a bigger company.
They make most of their money inside japan anyway, through domestic game market, publishing, and game centers (through both Taito and their custom collection game machines).